My quest to become London’s premier Rubbish Polymath leads me to all sorts of places in the name of edutainment (the pub, in the case below), and I don’t always have wherewithal/spoons to record my Very Important Thorts thereon. Thus there follows a guest post by my co-conspirator, the sole resident and Poet Laureate of the People’s Republic (I have kept all the other jobs), Citizen AJ Dehany.
Recently, at a regular comedy night devoted to offering punters a cheap gig and comedians a chance to try out new material in a sympathetic atmosphere, there was an unsympathetic incident. A funny but not widely known comedian, just as he was about to finish his set, got himself badly heckled, and the whole place exploded.
How, why? The comedian, mixed-race and liberal as all hell, had done some routines involving a strip club, documenting his amused unease in such an environment and some exchanges with a “£5-a-go” Chinese lap dancer. As he was finishing up, he asked, in a manner of speaking, if there was Any Other Business from the floor. Immediately, a man near the front row stood up and set on him. He made a broad accusation of misogyny about the material, and in so many words asked the comedian if he thought it was okay to be misogynistic as long as you were not racist, and whether the comedian’s mixed race status meant he felt he was exempt from such issues. Arguably a racist suggestion in itself, made to a comedian noted for his “frank but ironic take on racism” – ironically the heckler had taken issue with ‘the one about the Chinese lapdancer’.
The comedian hardly knew what to make of this. He was embarrassed as much because he’d been seconds away from leaving the stage and was now in a situation. The comedian made the mistake of inviting the heckler to explain his criticisms, but the heckler was strident without humour and seemed to believe he was in an appropriate forum for a political debate chaired by His Truly. He somewhat aggressively invited the comedian to “Buy me a drink afterwards, and I’ll tell you” and, not unnaturally, the comedian saw the unfunny. In little short order, with feathers flying, he left the stage, and left the heckler too, who still had the floor seemingly expecting to have his points addressed (maybe with footnotes).
Without going into the intricacies of the controversial comedic material, which I’ve in any case quite forgotten, there was a feeling that the heckler had the nub of a decent point and that we should all strictly speaking have been on the heckler’s side, but that he had lost the audience when he’d made it into his own ‘ego thing’. It is interesting that the comedian let the heckler get to him, implying that the comedian was aware that there were potentially problematic sexual and racial elements to the material that he was presenting, and suggesting that his confidence had been knocked by being pulled up on it. It seems rather unfair to knock a comedian who has a certain bravery in choosing to confront racial and sexual matters for not laying out the issues clearly in footnoted essay form. I mean: it’s comedy! But then, if you go there, you can say that Jeremy Clarkson’s observations are “just comedy” too – hey man, lighten up. If anything, I expect that the comedian’s undoing was actually in not having gone far enough to raise a racial/sexual question from an ironic liberal but provocative angle. He perhaps knew there was a conceptual weakness in the material and the heckler managed to spring it open.
My response on either side of this, should I dignify it by calling it a debate, is qualified. I’m uneasy about the heckler’s line of questioning, more so than the disputed elements of the routine itself. Furthermore this unease makes me uneasy. Others seemed to have a different reaction. When the smokers shuffled outside during the interval, eye-rolling at, and then gradually talking to, each other, one audience member took the following position. It wasn’t so much that the material was inappropriate but the context might have been; you have to consider the reaction before speaking out in public – and this applies to both comedian and heckler.
Furthermore, she said, what would be fine and sweetly outrageous to say in a group of familiar friends might not be appropriate for public utterance. Her point was that not everybody would know to take it as tongue-in-cheek comment. This seems a little problematic in itself – who is to say which audiences are “educated” enough to take things the “right” way? Nevertheless, we all do this, un-PC jokes or whatever, something scenting of scandalous but that you’d never say ‘out loud’… Except that some people do say it out loud, and we call these people comedians, and pay to watch them. What is it we are asking of our comedians if we can round on them for only doing their job? Or had the comedian just not considered his material thoroughly enough? And is it even his job to do so?
After the interval, the big name comedian headliner seemed less willing to be edgy than we’d expected, or than the earlier acts had been before the bad business. Worse still, he seemed to at times to be indulging in that kind of distancing-from-my-material-just-in-case facial expression Jimmy Carr does when he says something idiotic that is “hey, just comedy”. The temperature in the room had dropped, and everyone had suddenly become more aware of the implications and underpinnings of comedic material. Shit had got real, and the comedy had got less funny. Funny that.
